GetAbout Columbia outspends counterparts on education, promotion

Friday, May 29, 2009 | 12:01 a.m. CDT

Robert Johnson and Michelle Windmoeller attach a rear wheel back onto Windmoeller's bike after completing a tire changing demonstration during a GetAbout Columbia Confident City Cycling Class inside of Stephens Lake Activities Center on May 6. Johnson and Windmoeller are both instructors with the program.¦ Polina Yamshchikov/Missourian

COLUMBIA — On a sunny Saturday morning, Carole Riesenberg rode her bike alongside her friend to their first Confident City Cycling class, hosted by GetAbout Columbia and the PedNet Coalition. They arrived at Stephens Lake Activities Center to find one other student and two instructors.

Riesenberg and the two others listened intently as their instructors described the anatomy of a bicycle and how to share a lane with a car.

GetAbout programs

Earn-A-Bike: For children who want to learn basic bike maintenance and
safety. It consists of four one-hour sessions and students receive a
free bike at the end of the last one.

Confident
City Cycling: Teaches people 14 years and older how to conduct bicycle
safety checks, fix a flat tire and avoid traffic collisions. It costs
$20 and is offered as three, three-hour classes or one, nine-hour class.

Bike
Buddy: Pairs a Columbia resident with a trained bicycle expert who
teaches how to check for repairs, find bike equipment and plan safe
routes. The one-on-one program lasts three months.

Cycle/Recycle: A fall event that gives gently used bikes to those who do not have one.
Education and basic training is provided to those who attend.Commuting
course: For adults interested in biking to school or work. It costs $15
and participants learn route selection, proper parking and lighting,
riding in inclement weather and handling cargo.

WalkSafe,
BikeSafe: A biking and walking safety class for children in
kindergarten through third grade physical education classes.

Walking
School Bus: An elementary school program where kindergarten through
fifth-grade students walk as a group to school in the morning.

Related Media

Michelle Windmoeller shows her mother-in-law Kathy Windmoeller how to pop the tire back over the air tube on the wheel of her bicycle during a GetAbout Columbia Confident City Cycling Class inside of Stephens Lake Activities Center on May 6. "I think confidence in cycling definitely makes you safer," Windmoeller said.

Robert Johnson and Rachel Pinnow inspect Pinnow's completed changed tire during a GetAbout Columbia Confident City Cycling Class inside Stephens Lake Activities Center on May 6. "I wanted to start commuting on my bike more and realized that I needed a refresher course," Pinnow said of the class.

Michelle Windmoeller works to fit the tire back over the air tube on her bicycle wheel during a GetAbout Columbia Confident City Cycling Class inside of Stephens Lake Activities Center on May 6. Windmoeller was demonstrating how to change a flat tire to class participants.

"I was surprised there were only three of us there," said Riesenberg, who heard of the class through a friend that works for GetAbout. "I just thought it'd be something that lots of people would be interested in doing, like I think lots of people would be interested in the environment."

There are nine other educational programs offered by the PedNet Coalition — a local nonprofit that predates GetAbout Columbia — using the federal grant funds. The GetAbout grant started paying for these programs more than a year and a half ago.

"We would love every class to be sold out," said Ian Thomas, PedNet executive director. "Fewer kids
are taking BikePro and with the commuting class, there's not a lot of
interest."

Because of the low level of participation, PedNet discontinued the
Commuting, Earn-A-Bike and BikePro courses. The organization has, however, added
two new classes, one to educate bike shop employees and one for basic
bike-riding skills.

GetAbout Columbia has allocated $3.17 million of its $22 million grant on promotion and education — about 14 percent — since the brand's inception in 2007 to promote nonmotorized transportation. That full amount goes to Vangel Marketing Communications, a local public relations firm, which has used some of those funds for advertising and the GetAbout Web site.

Ted Curtis, director of GetAbout, said Columbia is spending more for education and promotion than the three other cities who received the same nonmotorized transportation grant from the Federal Highway Administration.

Mary Ebeling, manager of the pilot program in Sheboygan, Wis., said her county will have spent 2 percent of its grant, or about $440,000, on education and promotion by the end of 2010. The Minneapolis pilot program, Bike Walk Twin Cities, will have spent a minimum of $2 million on education and promotion, director Joan Pasiuk said. Principal Transportation Planner Dan Dawson of Marin County, Calif., said that county expects to spend about $1 million on education and promotion.

Each of the four pilot programs financed by the federal grants spends grant money
how they see fit. Jill Stedem, a spokeswoman for the Columbia Public Works Department, said GetAbout officials saw education as the best way to get the
community involved.

Stedem said a citizens
advisory committee developed ideas for programs and produced a
list of education opportunities "they felt were important."

"They thought education was needed to
get people to change their attitudes and using alternative forms of
transportation," Stedem said.

Under GetAbout Columbia, Vangel pays PedNet for its education programs — about $474,000
through December 2008 and an additional $300,000 budgeted from April 1
to the end of the project next year.

Shannan Baker, a Vangel account manager, estimated the nonprofit will be paid $70,156 for its work during January, February and March. Baker said those invoices were still being processed so that amount may change.

In 2007, the city signed a contract with Vangel to
handle marketing for GetAbout. The PedNet Coalition signed on as a
subconsultant for the company.

Both PedNet, whose bicycle education efforts predate the federal
grant, and Vangel applied to run GetAbout's education and promotion
during the city's bidding process.

Some classes charge a fee, which Thomas said goes directly to the city Parks and Recreation Department for the use of its facilities. Instructors for the bicycling classes are paid out of the GetAbout grant itself.

There are two exceptions to the low turnout for GetAbout classes:

WalkSafe, BikeSafe has
taught 2,893 students from kindergarten through third grade. The program
brings an instructor, certified by the League of American Bicyclists,
to physical education classes to give children safe walking and biking
techniques.

The Walking School Bus program, which involved more than 400 students last fall.

These classes bumped participation in GetAbout education to nearly 4,000.

Despite the strong participation in the two programs aimed at school children, both will have less GetAbout funding next school year. Curtis said it was a joint decision between the GetAbout executive committee and staff. Both programs have a better potential for outside funding, he said, which would ease GetAbout budget constraints.

Jennifer Perlow walked her 7-year-old daughter to Lee Elementary School with other participants and signed up again for the spring Walking School Bus session, which started March 9. She learned about the program from her daughter's friends.

"She gets exercise before she starts the school day and expends some energy before the school day," Perlow said. "I consider it to be exercise, she considers it to be play time with her friends."

Thomas said the time commitment required of the other classes might deter people from signing up. For example, the Confident City Cycling class, which had 130 students in 18 months, is three sessions, each three hours long.

"It's a big time commitment," he said. "But I actually think it's quite good to get 130 people."

Thomas said 100 percent of Confident City Cycling graduates reported biking more often. The three-hour Bike Skills 101 class was developed to ease time constraints.

Riesenberg said she hates missing the farmers market on Saturday morning, but what she learned made it worthwhile.

"I need to learn bike safety and bike maintenance," she said of the class. "It was really good and the presenters are such good people. It's hard not to have a positive response."

Comments

Such a waste of a Grant when long ago in a time longer still parents used to teach all of these skills for free.

Now parents teach their children the shortest distance to the nearest Happy Meal,how to learn to use the remote for the entertainment system and last but not least how to use their cell phones to capture other kids fighting in schools or in a public setting.

Perhaps this should be a wake up call to the GetAbout Columbia group that MOST bikers don't want to ride there bikes next to cars. Give us PAVED TRAILS away from the cars that will kill bikers!!!!!!!!!!

Jimmy Dugan sounds like exactly the kind of person who should sign up for Confident City Cycling. He would learn that biking on trails, one is statistically more likely to be injured than when riding on the roadways. He would learn that positioning yourself properly on the streets increases your visibility and predictability to motorists, and he would learn that when riding properly and following traffic laws and principles he is much safer. Jimmy, I encourage you to contact Getabout Columbia and sign up for their class.

Trails such as the MKT are pretty safe, much more so than ones that snake through the woods because they're designed for thrill-seeking mountain bikers. Are your stats breaking out injuries by trail type or activity type?

Well, they're not MY stats, but if you go back, I didn't say that you are more likely to be hit by a car, I said you are more likely to be injured. Same goes for sidewalk riding, but in that case, you are more likely to be hit by a car.

The point is, riding a bicycle on the streets isn't the dangerous activity it is often made out to be. In fact, if you go back through the newspaper archives and find articles about cyclists that have been hit by cars in Columbia in the past few years, you won't find very many. And, considering that the majority of riders do not ride nearly as safe as those that take Getabout Columbia's Confident City Cycling class, I'd say that adds up to an endorsement of both the relative safety of bicycle riding and the benefit of Confident City Cycling.

So if riding on the streets isn't that dangerous, why are we funding these classes? Either most people already know that it's not dangerous and that's why attendance is so sparse, or they don't know and the money could be more effectively spent on PSAs to educate them about the low risk. Either way, these classes don't appear to be a prudent use of taxpayer money.

As for injuries, there's a big difference between getting hit by a car and skidding out on a rocky trail and skinning your knee. Do the stats account for such differences?

$3.2 million with nearly nothing to show for it but some poorly attended classes, this website: http://getaboutcolumbia.com and some promotional materials most people have never seen.

Absolutely outrageous! When is this kind of crap going to come to a screeching halt in this town:

"GetAbout Columbia has allocated $3.17 million of its $22 million grant on promotion and education — about 14 percent — since the brand's inception in 2007 to promote non motorized transportation. That full amount goes to Vangel Marketing Communications, a local public relations firm...."

After months of anticipation, the first applications from developers seeking public assistance for downtown projects are in the hands of commission members who can make or break the developers’ case for “tax increment financing” to the Columbia City Council.

Now it’s a waiting game for the developers as the TIF commission reviews the applications and sets a public hearing.

By law, the commission’s public hearing must be advertized at least 45 days before the hearing date, but it likely will be even farther down the road because the notices have to put together and published in local media.

Developer John Ott, an owner of the Tiger Hotel, submitted an application for $1.79 million in financing in an $8.9 million plan to redevelop the Columbia landmark into a boutique hotel. Also, Trittenbach Development is seeking $3.3 million in TIF financing for its $17.1 million project to create an eight-story mixed-use development at Tenth and Locust streets.

Each development team gave a short presentation yesterday before the commission.

“In the next couple of weeks, you might want to have meetings and a work session with each developer for a longer presentation,” Assistant City Manager Tony St. Romaine said. “Then you can move on to a formal public hearing.”

After the public hearing, the commission will make a recommendation to the city council, which will have the final say.